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Are You Bloated or Satisfied?

It seems that these days we’re always hungry. Not just for food … but for stuff, for possessions, for success, for pleasurable experiences and holidays and comfort and on and on. We hunger for all sorts of things. We yearn for them, dream about them, picture them in our minds. I wonder, what are you […]

It seems that these days we’re always hungry. Not just for food … but for stuff, for possessions, for success, for pleasurable experiences and holidays and comfort and on and on. We hunger for all sorts of things. We yearn for them, dream about them, picture them in our minds.

I wonder, what are you hungry for, right now? What desire occupies your imagination?

The older I get, the more I come to the realisation that it doesn’t matter how many things we stuff ourselves with, we’re never satisfied. Bloated yes, satisfied no.

The amazing thing is – at least it was an amazing revelation to me as I started to listen to what Jesus had to say – that it’s not what we consume that satisfies us, it’s what we give.

Jesus said, “My food is to do what the one who sent me wants me to do. My food is to finish the work that he gave me to do. (John 4:34)

It’s an apparently innocuous statement – but it’s so, so powerful. It’s so, so true. When you think about food, you think about a pleasurable experience. You think about being filled, about being satisfied. And it was in that very context, that Jesus spoke those words. His disciples were confused. They were all hungry, yet Jesus spoke about food that they didn’t know about and so they asked Him, well, where did you get that food?

As I said, we labour away under the impression that what we get, what we fill ourselves with, is what satisfies us. But here, Jesus is saying the complete opposite to that. The thing that satisfies me, He says, is doing what My Father sent me to do, finishing the work that He gave Me to do. And that, let’s not forget, meant going to the Cross and being crucified.

That significance that we all yearn for, that sense of achievement and contentment and satisfaction that we all long for, never ever comes from the things that we receive. It only ever comes from the things that we give, the things that we give sacrificially, because God called us to give them.

If only I could have learned that powerful truth years earlier in my life.

Getting out there, doing God’s will, serving other people with the gifts we’ve been given, that’s where it’s at.